


The World

by Art3mys



Series: I go through the world with ghosts besides me [1]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Force Ghost Qui-Gon Jinn, Gen, Grogu | Baby Yoda Needs a Hug, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Noromo mando, Order 66 (Star Wars), POV Grogu | Baby Yoda, Protective Qui-Gon Jinn, Sad Grogu | Baby Yoda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:01:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29410911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Art3mys/pseuds/Art3mys
Series: I go through the world with ghosts besides me [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2160594
Comments: 24
Kudos: 29





	1. The World

**Title: I go through the world with ghosts besides me**

_“He was trained by many masters”_

\--Asoka Tano

**Prelude: The World**

**Time: 29 BBY**

**Place: Jedi Temple, Coruscant**

Grogu's world is big, but it is known. Streams of bright morning light wake him in the crowded sleeping room.

It is bright the noisy room where the youngest ones run, snack, play, and nap. He lurches across the soft floor towards the tiny squid-shaped toy, peeking out from behind a table. Friends race and argue around him. “Shhhh,” say a teacher.

After evening meal, the teachers bring everyone back to the sleeping room and tuck them in. From cot to cot, friends sing the goodnight song until it fades to a whisper. Soon, slow breaths from the other cots lull him to sleep. If he happens to wake in the darkness, warm arms scoop him up and slowly rock him, until gently laying him back down.

Day after day. Year after year. Faces change but the world remains the same. The world is the world is the world.

**Time: 21 BBY**

**Place: Jedi Temple, Coruscant**

One morning, however, whispers wake him. Near the bottom of his cot, Master Yoda stands with a spare older female master with white hair pulled back in a bun, bending her head toward him. Grogu lifts a green claw from the blanket and waves a bit, but he is ignored.  
  
“Clouded, the future is,” rasped Master Yoda. “Our path, I cannot see.”

“We have done well to this point,” says the older woman. “Keeping him with the youngest force-sensitives has afforded him our protection while also shielding him from those who might use him. If he is lured to the dark side, the impact would be felt not for decades, but centuries”

“Many names, he has had,” chuckles Master Yoda. He then turns to face the cot, “Trained you must be. Secret you must be kept, young…..”

“Grogu.”

“Grogu,” repeats Master Yoda.  
  


 **Place: Jedi Temple, Coruscant – Grand Master Yoda’s Chambers  
**  
It is quiet in the new room. Master Yoda leans on his stick with gently closed eyes, his mind assessing a distant battle on a distant star. He finally says: “Train you I must. Learn, you must.”

Grogu sits, claws gently resting with palms open to the air. He opens his mind to the Force as it moves swiftly, with an unseen power and purpose, like the guards, masters, younglings, and padawans that move through the temple halls. He is curious about where the Force could take him, but Master tells him to focus. Like holding the teacher’s robe or hands with friends, focusing keeps him from getting lost. He doesn’t want to be lost, so he obeys Master Yoda.

Outside his world, the darkness gathers and swells.

**Time: Order 66: 19 BBY**

**Place: Jedi Temple, Coruscant**

When he wakes this time, it is dark, but no warm hands scoop and rock him. He cries, but no one comes. He hears laser swords whooshing and clashing. He trembles and scrunches down between the wall and the cot. The blanket falls over him.

Friends are scared. They are crying. They say, “Go.” They are gone.

He reaches tentatively for the Force, but it is dark and angry, deep and powerful. Grogu pulls back. There is no hand to hold and he dares not go alone. He wedges himself deep against the wall, shaking and alone until sleep finally claims him  
  
He is taken. He knows not where or by whom.


	2. The Fragile Past

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the canyons of Tatooine, Obi-Wan encounters a force projection.

_“I closed the box and put it in a closet._ _There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”  
― _ _Joan Didion_

**Time: 16 BBY**

**Place: Tatooine**

Obi-wan learns that grief comes in waves, fierce and unpredictable. Cold, dark walls of water grab and tumble him until he loses all direction and breath gathers weight in his chest. The waves on Tatooine are sand, but they can drown you all the same.

There isn’t anything else to do on Tatooine, but walk the endless dunes and canyons, high dusty red sand walls almost closing off the sky. Luke is a toddler. Obi-Wan doesn’t want to break up the kid’s family. Wasn’t that his first mistake, of many, with Anakin? No, Obi-wan thinks. Let Luke be.

At some level, Obi-Wan had missed signs of Anakin’s growing darkness because he didn’t want to see them. Looking up at the endless sandstone canyon walls, he realizes that “Oh, Anakin,” wasn’t a reprimand, it was resignation. Sensitive to Anakin’s childhood trauma, he excused his apprentice time after time. After thrusting his saber through the traitor Tal Merrick’s back, Anakin had shrugged it off: “What? He was going to blow up the ship.” Despite this death, he said nothing. It wasn’t until too late that he realized how long he had lived in denial about Anakin, and how painful it was to surrender it.

His only allowance for grief occurred today, the anniversary of the day he left the Jedi Temple to kill Grievous. The last time he saw Anakin. Survivors mourn the memory of life, not the knowledge of death. And Anakin had been alive that day, gripped by a conflict that he couldn’t fully grasp, but vibrant with energy. On this day of all days, he lets himself remember Anakin.

Those first few months with his new padawan had been difficult. Still fresh from the trials and Qui-Gon’s loss, Obi-Wan had put himself on autopilot, guiding Anakin through the fighting forms and meditation exercises without saying anything else to the boy. Only when Anakin’s misery became impossible to ignore did Obi-Wan pulled himself out of his own grief. He willed himself into drawing Anakin out by teasing him, carrying him piggy-backed through the halls, grabbing him the odd, sweet treat from the kitchen. Over time, the boy who almost swiped his lightsaber on more than one occasion, became closer than blood. As he walks through the canyon, Obi-Wan’s love and longing for Anakin, his lost student, burns bright waves through the Force.

And is caught by a thread. The force signature of a grieving, broken, fragile child, also once a student and definitely lost, gathers itself around the longing, and followed it to Tatooine.

Obi-Wan feels the force disturbance, spins, but sees nothing. Squinting, he spots a fragment of cloth about 10 feet up, behind a small outcropping of the canyon walls.  
  
“Hello?” Nothing happened so Obi-Wan calls, “I’m not going to hurt you.” He is rewarded with the partial emergence of a small figure, with translucent green ears and large, but wary eyes. The figure slightly glows with the immense power of the Force.

It looks like Yoda but is not Yoda. It is a child of Yoda’s species with enough strength to physically manifest itself on Tatooine. Obi-Wan sighs. He had never seen force projection and thought any Jedi would die in the process, but here it is. He has one mission, and it isn’t this. Still.

“Let me get a good look at you,” he says, bounding up the rocks towards it. Accustomed to approaching wary strangers, Obi-Wan stops about a foot away and waits, promising, “I won’t hurt you.” Eventually, the child rewards him by shuffling forward and lifting his arms to be held.

For a second, Obi-Wan wonders. Could you even pick up a force projection? Well, apparently you can. Once lifted and held, the child curls tight against his chest. The sharp claws dig little holes in his linen robes.

The child must have felt safe because one claw untangles itself, seeks, and holds tightly onto Obi-Wan’s thumb. As the child’s grip tightens, flickering images unspool across his understanding. A padawan, struggling to keep up with a striding master. A grinning Wookie igniting his new lightsaber before gaggle of younglings. A Nautolan teacher acting out the parts of an ancient Jedi story, tentacles bouncing. Master Yoda slipping the child a slimy-looking treat behind the teacher’s back. Rows of tiny cots, with a favorite soft toy carefully placed on each pillow. Obi-Wan slept there, long ago as had Anakin, for just a night or two. He allows the memory of his drowsy, young padawan in a room full of light to surface and shares it with the child. Filtered through Obi-Wan’s understanding, the memory bears no resemblance to the man that Anakin became, just the child he was.  
  
The effect is immediate. The child’s head snaps up so his eyes can meet Obi-Wan’s. His ears lifts and his grin shows tiny baby teeth. The child welcomes him as one who knew his world, what had been his entire universe. The world is the world is the world. Hope sparkles in large, dark brown eyes as the child declares his recognition, “Patu!”

At first, Obi-Wan smiles, but as he feels the child’s anticipation growing, he comes to a dreadful realization. The child wants to be returned to the Jedi Temple. Not the Temple with walls stained red by Jedi blood, but the quiet, peaceful place that existed before the Clone Wars. The child wants the Temple of memory. Worse, he expects it.

A veteran of a thousand negotiations, liberator of star systems, Obi-Wan braces himself for what comes next. He has a single purpose, protecting Luke. He cannot leave Tatooine, nor can he risk contacting anyone off planet. He cannot allow the child, with the tremendous, traceable energy of force projection to stay here a second longer. He gently untangles the child from where he clings to his chest. As had happened many times, he only has his words.

Obi-Wan looks the child in the eye, ignores his hopefully lifted ears, and tells him the truth, chest tightening at having to say it again – that the Order had fallen, the Jedi had scattered, and the most crucial thing to do now is to hide.Obi-Wan does not look away as waves of understanding slowly wash over the child’s face. His large sorrowful eyes seek out Obi-Wan’s own, but Obi-Wan only draws the child back against his chest.

“You must hide as long as you can. This period will end. I promise you, but in the meanwhile, you cannot ….” He falters. For the child, use of the Force has to be as natural as breathing but Obi-Wan has to be explicit.

“You cannot show anyone who you are. You must not practice anything that you learned at the Temple. You cannot reveal what you know and can do.” Obi-Wan can feel tendrils of fear emanating from the child, but he knows it might be the only thing keeping him safe. “This will not last forever, I promise you. A new world will come.”

Finally, he falls silent. As he had with Anakin, waking from another bad dream, he rocks the child. Slowly, snuffles and then sobs work their way through the child’s small body. As the child falls into sleep, the edges of the force projection fade and the weight against Obi-Wan lessens, soon vanishing entirely.

He is once again alone on Tatooine with Luke, memories of Anakin Skywalker, and a million, trillion grains of sand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @lastwordbeforetheend edited this work and made it so much better in the process.

**Author's Note:**

> I did it! It's the longest fiction I've ever written and my 2nd fan-fic. @Moonie and @Fanfoolishness really helped. The musical inspiration came from @SgtPabs, so thank you. There's a line in a song by Florent Dorit, "“I am a child / I go through the world with ghosts besides me." It got me thinking....what if Grogu could see force ghosts? What if they helped him? And what would a force ghost say to a hurting child? There is only one thing that Qui-Gon can do, really.
> 
> The whole #noromo mando group is amazing. 
> 
> I hope you like the fic.


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